`One of every five calories in the American diet is liquid. The nation’s single biggest “food” is soda, and nutrition experts have long demonized it.
Now they are escalating the fight.
In reports to be published in science journals this week, two groups of researchers hope to add evidence to the theory that soda and other sugar-sweetened drinks don’t just go hand-in-hand with obesity, but actually cause it. Not that these drinks are the only cause — genetics, exercise and other factors are involved — but that they are one cause, perhaps the leading cause.’
follow up to Soft drinks found to have high levels of cancer chemical.
`The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said the companies that use perfluorooctanoic acid, an ingredient in Teflon, will cut the chemical’s use.
PFOA or its related chemicals, used in nonstick cookware, waterproof clothing and food packaging doesn’t break down in the environment and has been found in low levels in the blood of some 90 percent of Americans, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday.
The EPA hasn’t established safe levels of PFOA exposure, but an independent panel recommended in February that the agency classify PFOA as a “likely” carcinogen, while the EPA develops a final risk assessment of the chemical.’
follow up to Teflon’s sticky situation.
`Inside the bottle are samples left over from one of the strangest incidents in recent meteorological history. On 25 July, 2001, blood-red rain fell over the Kerala district of western India. And these rain bursts continued for the next two months. All along the coast it rained crimson, turning local people’s clothes pink, burning leaves on trees and falling as scarlet sheets at some points.
Investigations suggested the rain was red because winds had swept up dust from Arabia and dumped it on Kerala. But Godfrey Louis, a physicist at Mahatma Gandhi University in Kottayam, after gathering samples left over from the rains, concluded this was nonsense. ‘If you look at these particles under a microscope, you can see they are not dust, they have a clear biological appearance.’ Instead Louis decided that the rain was made up of bacteria-like material that had been swept to Earth from a passing comet. In short, it rained aliens over India during the summer of 2001.’
`Even as Congolese villagers devise novel ways to snare the fast-disappearing bonobo, scientists are racing to save the gentle “hippie chimp” from extinction.
The bonobo, or pan paniscus, is closely related to man and known for resolving squabbles through sex rather than violence. It’s also prized by some Congolese for its tasty meat. The wiry, wizened-faced chimps are being killed in treetop nests in Congo’s vast rain forest, their only natural habitat in the world, by villagers who do not seem to know how fast their prey is disappearing. [..]
Bonobos are most easily captured when asleep drunk, say poachers in Congo’s Equator province who intoxicate the chimps with bottled beer and palm wine before tying them into bags for local meat markets.’
`A team of scientists from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, in collaboration with colleagues from the Argonne National Laboratory (USA) and the Spintec laboratory (Grenoble, France), has for the first time produced microscopic magnetic states, known as “displaced vortex states”, that will allow an increase in the size of MRAMs (which are not deleted when the computer is switched off). The research has been published in Physical Review Letters and Applied Physics Letters. [..]
The “displaced vortex states”, first observed by UAB researchers, are small circular movements of just a few thousandths of a millimetre that form in the tiny zones where the data is stored. The information on hard drives has normally been saved by orientating these zones in specific directions. The zones pointing upwards, for example, codify a 1, and those pointing downwards a 0. The smaller and more compact these zones are, the greater the capacity of the hard drive. But if they are too close together, the magnetic field created by one can affect the neighbouring zone and wipe the data. However, if the field is saved in a whirlpool form, in “vortex state”, it does not leave the tiny zone to which it is confined and does not affect the neighbouring data, thus making it possible for a much larger hard drive capacity.’
`Antig Technology and AVC Corp. will demonstrate a production-ready fuel-cell insert for notebook PCs at the CeBIT trade show next week. [..]
The methanol-powered Antig fuel cell provides 45 watts of power on a single “tank” of methanol, and weighs 3.7 pounds (1.7 kg). In total, the additional power should be enough to operate the notebook for eight hours, AVC said, which was responsible for engineering the fuel cell into the notebook housing.’
`Backyard astronomers, grab your telescopes. Jupiter is growing a new red spot.
Christopher Go of the Philippines photographed it on February 27th using an 11-inch telescope and a CCD camera [..]
At first, Oval BA remained white—the same color as the storms that combined to create it. But in recent months, things began to change:
“The oval was white in November 2005, it slowly turned brown in December 2005, and red a few weeks ago,” reports Go. “Now it is the same color as the Great Red Spot!”‘
`Scientists have discovered a huge crater in the Saharan desert, the largest one ever found there.
The crater is about 19 miles (31 kilometers) wide, more than twice as big as the next largest Saharan crater known. It utterly dwarfs Meteor Crater in Arizona, which is about three-fourths of a mile (1.2 kilometers) in diameter.
In fact, the newfound crater, in Egypt, was likely carved by a space rock that was itself roughly 0.75 miles wide in an event that would have been quite a shock, destroying everything for hundreds of miles. For comparison, the Chicxulub crater left by a dinosaur-killing asteroid 65 million years ago is estimated to be 100 to 150 miles (160 to 240 kilometers) wide.’
`Scientists who study the sun, moon, planets and stars on Thursday protested the Bush administration’s plan to send humans back to the moon and on to Mars.
They say the president’s two-year-old Vision for Space Exploration program is gobbling up billions of dollars that they think could be better used for less expensive projects, including new telescopes and unmanned robots such as the twin rovers on Mars.
NASA has cut more than $3 billion from what it had promised for Earth and space science programs to make room for the moon-Mars exploration missions and 16 more shuttle flights to the half-finished International Space Station.
Partly as a result, the launch of the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope has been delayed until 2013, the search for Earthlike planets around other stars has been deferred indefinitely and the budget for the “astrobiology” program – the quest for life on other worlds – has been slashed by 50 percent.’
`A group of German scientists has deciphered the meaning of one of the most spectacular archeological discoveries in recent years: The mystery-shrouded sky disc of Nebra was used as an advanced astronomical clock.
The purpose of the 3,600 year-old sky disc of Nebra, which caused a world-wide sensation when it was brought to the attention of the German public in 2002, is no longer a matter of speculation.
A group of German scholars who studied this archaeological gem has discovered evidence which suggests that the disc was used as a complex astronomical clock for the harmonization of solar and lunar calendars.
“This is a clear expansion of what we knew about the meaning and function of the sky disc,” said archeologist Harald Meller.’
`When Ashlee Simpson tops the charts while a critically acclaimed ex-Beatle’s album fails to crack the top 200, eyebrows go up in the marketing world.
So what makes a hit?
A new study reveals that we make our music purchases based partly on our perceived preferences of others. [..]
Researchers found that popular songs were popular and unpopular songs were unpopular, regardless of their quality established by the other group. They also found that as a particular songs’ popularity increased, participants selected it more often.
The upshot for markerters: social influence affects decision-making in a market.’
`Russia plans to hit a golf ball into Earth orbit from the International Space Station. If NASA approves the plan, the ball would set records for the longest drive ever made – but some experts warn that a mishap could cause “catastrophic” damage to the station.
The plan is part of a commercial deal between the Russian space agency and Element 21 Golf Company, based in Toronto, Canada. In the plan, the station’s next crew members, due to launch to the station on 29 March, will try for the record-breaking swing during one of three planned spacewalks by September 2006. [..]
In a worst-case scenario, the ball would remain at the same altitude long enough that its orbital plane shifted until it could hit the station side-on, says J C Liou, an orbital debris expert at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, US. “Then you could potentially have something similar to a head-on collision with an impact speed of about 9.4 kilometres per second,” Liou told New Scientist.
The force of such a collision would be equivalent to that of a 6.5-tonne truck moving at nearly 100 kilometres per hour. “So the outcome of the worst-case scenario could be quite catastrophic,” he says. But he adds that such a dire scenario is “highly unlikely” to occur.’
`Ground-based astronomy could be impossible in 40 years because of pollution from aircraft exhaust trails and climate change, an expert says.
Aircraft condensation trails – known as contrails – can dissipate, becoming indistinguishable from other clouds.
If trends in cheap air travel continue, says Professor Gerry Gilmore, the era of ground astronomy may come to an end much earlier than most had predicted.’
`A Baton Rouge hospital, hoping to get to the bottom of an office prank, is ordering 25 employees to undergo DNA testing or be terminated.
Leaders at Woman’s Hospital say a man who works in Building Operations returned from several weeks off to find that someone had placed urine in his toolbox.
After hearing of the incident, hospital administrators sent a memo to 25 employees who also work there telling them that DNA testing would be done unless someone came forward admitting guilt. Since no one came forward, the hospital said the DNA testing will begin within the next few weeks.’
`Observations by astronomers tracking near-Earth asteroids have raised a new object to the top of the Earth-threat list.
The asteroid could strike the Earth in 2102. However, Don Yeomans, manager of NASA’s Near Earth Object Program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, US, told New Scientist: “The most likely situation, by far, is that additional observations will bring it back down to a zero.”
He adds: “We’re more likely to be hit between now and then by an object that we don’t know about.” ‘
`A car that can go from zero to 60 in four seconds and get more than 50 miles to the gallon would be enough to pique any driver’s interest. So who do we have to thank for it. Ford? GM? Toyota? No — just Victor, David, Cheeseborough, Bruce, and Kosi, five kids from the auto shop program at West Philadelphia High School
The five kids, along with a handful of schoolmates, built the soybean-fueled car as an after-school project. It took them more than a year — rummaging for parts, configuring wires and learning as they went. As teacher Simon Hauger notes, these kids weren’t exactly the cream of the academic crop.’
`Most people have a poor understanding of probability. One major difficulty is in appreciating how unlikely simple events become when several independent outcomes must all line up. This is one reason that lotteries are popular: people overestimate their chances of winning. [..]
In the demonstration below, the average state lottery is simulated to show exactly how unlikely it is that you will match all 6 numbers. In this simulation, you try to match 6 numbers between 1 and 50. You get a prize for matching 3 or more numbers. The simulation assumes there is 1 drawing per week, tickets cost $1, and that you purchase 1 ticket for each drawing.
It also shows you what would happen if you put the $1 away each week in an investment that earned you 5% compounded daily.’
`Forces brewing deep beneath Yellowstone National Park could be making one of the largest volcanoes on Earth even bigger, a new study reveals.
In the past decade, part of the volcano has risen nearly five inches, most likely due to a backup of flowing molten rock miles below the planet’s crust. [..]
Radar observations from the European Space Agency’s ERS-2 satellite reveal that the jellybean-shaped Yellowstone caldera—a giant depression caused by past volcanic explosions—began to rise in 1995.
Although the caldera floor started to sink in late 1997, part of the north rim, called the north rim uplift anomaly (NUA) continued rising until 2003.’
`The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple. A good example of a simple technology with profound historical consequences is hay. Nobody knows who invented hay, the idea of cutting grass in the autumn and storing it in large enough quantities to keep horses and cows alive through the winter. All we know is that the technology of hay was unknown to the Roman Empire but was known to every village of medieval Europe. Like many other crucially important technologies, hay emerged anonymously during the so-called Dark Ages. According to the Hay Theory of History, the invention of hay was the decisive event which moved the center of gravity of urban civilization from the Mediterranean basin to Northern and Western Europe. The Roman Empire did not need hay because in a Mediterranean climate the grass grows well enough in winter for animals to graze. North of the Alps, great cities dependent on horses and oxen for motive power could not exist without hay. So it was hay that allowed populations to grow and civilizations to flourish among the forests of Northern Europe. Hay moved the greatness of Rome to Paris and London, and later to Berlin and Moscow and New York.
Freeman Dyson Infinite in All Directions, Harper and Row, New York, 1988, p 135.’
`Nearly 400 years after Galileo determined the wispy Milky Way actually comprises myriad individual stars, scientists using NASA’s Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer have done the same for the “X-ray Milky Way.”
The origin of this X-ray counterpart to the Milky Way, known to scientists as the galactic X-ray background, has been a long-standing mystery. Scientists have determined the background is not diffuse, as many have thought. Rather, it emanates from untold hundreds of millions of individual sources dominated by a type of dead star called a white dwarf, along with stars with unusually strong coronas.’
`Abstract: The exponential dependence of resistivity on temperature in germanium is found to be a great big lie. My careful theoretical modeling and painstaking experimentation reveal 1) that my equipment is crap, as are all the available texts on the subject and 2) that this whole exercise was a complete waste of my time.’
`A new study by two economists from the University of Chicago taps into a trove of data from the 1960s to argue that when it comes to academic test scores, parents can let children watch TV without fear of future harm. [..]
Data from cities where preschoolers were exposed to the new technology, and data from cities where they were not, was correlated with test scores from about 300,000 students nationwide in 1965, as collected in the Coleman Report, a 1966 survey titled “Equality of Educational Opportunity” done under the Civil Rights Act. The study also looked at test scores from pre- and post-TV age groups within cities.
The result showed “very little difference and, if anything, a slight positive advantage” in test scores for children who grew up watching TV early on, compared to those who did not, Shapiro said. In nonwhite households and those where English was a second language or the mother had less than a high-school education, TV’s positive effect was more marked.’
`Bacteria are everywhere, silently going about their business of breaking down cellulose, fermenting foods or fixing nitrogen in the soil, among a host of other activities. Given their ubiquity and diversity of functions, biotechnologists have been searching for new uses for different strains of the microscopic organisms, such as consuming oil spills or even capturing images. Now biologists at the University College Dublin in Ireland have found that a strain of Pseudomonas putida can exist quite happily on a diet of pure styrene oil–the oil remnant of superheated Styrofoam–and, in the process, turn the environmental problem into a useful, biodegradable plastic.’
`This is a design of how to build a real UFO. On the ceramic mold that can be something as simple as clay mixed with fine sand and water or more complex. Homemade jet engines can be used to cure the mold and melt the metal but remember its not thrust that is needed it is heat(BE CAREFULE). For heat lower the RPM’s of the jet engine and increase the fuel flow. If your going to build and operate jet engines PLEASE talk to people who have experiance with such matters. An exploding jet engine will KILL YOU and whom ever you have around. Your family, kids, or friends. Be careful. Jet engines are very much simple machines to build with very few parts but they are dangerous. Also, coal or both coal and jet engines(much safer for newbie’s or turbin fans and coal is much more safer.) to cure the mold and fire it. Coal can be homemade too and its cheaper than buying it. Jet engines can be made with a home foundry and coal or just buy the parts and put them together or just order them out right. And last, depending on how much heat planed to throw at the mold and how big the UFO is it may be necessary to throw up a kiln around it. The kiln can be designed as necessary.’
`Lovers know only too well that men usually need a “recovery period” after orgasm, and that sexual intercourse with orgasm is more satisfying than an orgasm from masturbation alone. Now scientists think the two phenomena might be linked.
Following orgasm, the hormone prolactin is released into the bloodstream in both men and women. The hormone makes us feel satiated by countering the effect of dopamine, which is released during sexual arousal. [..]
Surprisingly, after orgasm from sexual intercourse, the increase in blood prolactin levels is 400 per cent higher in both sexes compared with after orgasm from masturbation [..]’
`Specks of comet dust carried to Earth inside a NASA science probe show tantalizing hints of organic compounds, bolstering suspicions that comets delivered key ingredients for the development of life on Earth.
Analysis of the samples brought back last month aboard the Stardust capsule is in the very early stages, but lead scientist Donald Brownlee said this week that he is encouraged by what researchers have found so far.
“We’re seeing a variety of things that we know absolutely come from a comet,” Brownlee, an astronomer with the University of Washington, said at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Though analysis has just begun, the samples so far have revealed iron, sulfides, glassy materials and traces of olivine.’
`Almost 80 years ago, a conference on physics organized in Brussels, in the heat of inter-war period, reunited elenco of privileged minds unique.
At the beginning of last century XX, the industrialist and filántropo Belgian Ernest Solvay used part of his fortune in organizing several conferences on physics to which the privileged minds more of the moment were invited.’
‘A teacher who castrated a live pig in front of high school students is the target of protests by animal rights activists throughout the country. [..]
“We’re concerned not only because animals suffer during these routine castrations but also because of the message it sends to students who are still forming opinions about treatment of animals in our society,” said Stephanie Bell, a PETA cruelty case worker.
Rod Van Norman, superintendent of the Southern Kern Unified School District School, said animal castrations often occur in agriculture classes and are an important skill for students to learn.’
`Thriving in conditions that would turn most living things to Popsicles, these inch-long earthworm cousins inhabit glaciers and snowfields in the coastal ranges of Alaska, British Columbia, Washington and Oregon. They move through seemingly solid ice with ease and are at their liveliest near the freezing point of water. Warm them up slightly and they dissolve into goo.
Their life cycle remains a mystery.’
`A star in a galaxy not so far way, at least in cosmic terms, is exploding, astronomers say.
Already the star outshines its entire galaxy, a smudge of light about 440 million light-years away in the constellation Aries. But that, astronomers believe, is still only the beginning, and telescopes around the world are being turned toward Aries in anticipation of documenting one of the rarest and most violent events in nature, a supernova explosion.
The conflagration was detected on Saturday as a long burst of gamma rays by NASA’s Swift satellite. Such bursts have been linked to supernova explosions in which a massive star collapses into a black hole.’
